does anyone know is it ok in C++ embedded to
- allocate a volatile array on the stack
- store stuff in that array
- store a pointer to that array in a register for a peripheral
- let the peripheral use the data in the array
Given the condition that the work will complete *before* i return from the function?
My concern is whether the compiler can see that after writing the pointer to some memory address, i never read the array from the C++ code. and then if the compiler will decide it's a dead variable it can optimize out of existence entirely
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@artemis you could always make a blackbox function in assembly. this makes the pattern unconditionally safe
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@whitequark this is true, and i use this approach in rust. but, gcc inline assembly syntax... :(
There’s some chatter lately about how Generative AI will “revolutionize” language learning – particularly when it comes to learning to speak a language like Japanese. After trying out several services, we think that's bunk. Here's why.
https://unseen-japan.com/ai-japanese-speaking-practice/
#japan #unseenjapan #ujwebsite #japanese
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Don't Learn Japanese Using AI: A picture of an anime style young woman on the left and a real live human being on the right with a Japanese flag and pagoda in the background...
@unseenjapan
Very interesting article, thanks. AI for language learning is, for most purposes, boring garbage. Makes a mess and then humans have to clean up after it. The whole purpose of learning another language is to communicate human to human, not human to customer service bot pretending to be interactive.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected the DOJ's request to block orders that the tump administration facilitate the release of wrongly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
The decision, which was written by Reagan-appointed Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, has some scathing words and shouts out the quiet part that the administration is headed towards lawlessness. Yet it offers hope that better angels may prevail.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca4.178400/gov.uscourts.ca4.178400.8.0.pdf
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Images of few snippets from the ruling
Perfect is the Enemy of Good Enough
My Papa, my mother’s father, C. J. Mortimer died in Saint John, New Brunswick in 2020. Flying through the Toronto and Montreal airports in September to his funeral was one of the surreal experiences of my life, with misting tunnels of aerosolized alcohol to kill any microbe on your skin, hair, clothes, and luggage; airport terminals with more rodent traps than people; and a hypersensitivity to everyone’s cough and sniffle that I haven’t been able to shake.
I was angry, then. I’m still angry. Angry that I couldn’t hug my grandmother. Angry that weeping itself was complicated and contagious. Angry that I couldn’t be together or near or held. Angry that I was putting my family at home at risk by even going. Angry that we didn’t hold the line on the lockdowns long enough to manage the disease properly. Angry at the whiners.
This isn’t a pandemic post, though. Well, no more than any post I’ve made since 2020. No more than any post I will make for the foreseeable.
This is a post about what my grandfather gave to me.
Y’see, I’m not the first computer nerd in the family. My Grampy, my father’s father, was and my father is a computer nerd. Grampy’s memoirs were typed into a Commodore 64. Dad is still fighting with Enterprise Java, of all things, to help his medical practice run smoothly.
And Papa? In the 60s he was offered lucrative computer positions at Irving Oil in Saint John and IBM in the US. Getting employment in the tech industry was different in those days, not leastwise because the tech industry didn’t really exist yet. You didn’t get jobs because you studied it in school, because there weren’t classes in it. You didn’t get jobs because of your experience in the field, because the most experienced you could be was the handful of years they’d been at it. You didn’t get jobs because of your knowledge of a programming language, because there were so few of them and they were all so new (and proprietary).
So what was a giant like International Business Machines to do? How could it identify in far-flung, blue-collar Atlantic Canada a candidate computer programmer? Because though the tech industry didn’t exist in a way we’d necessarily recognize, it was already hungrier for men to work in it than the local markets could supply.
In my Papa’s case, they tested his aptitude with the IBM Aptitude Test for Programmer Personnel (copyright 1964):
Again, though, how do you evaluate programmer aptitude without a common programming language? Without common idioms? Without even a common vocabulary of what “code” could mean or be?
IBM used pattern-matching questions with letters:
And pattern-matching questions with pictures:
And arithmetic reasoning questions:
And that was it. For the standardized portion of the process, at least.
Papa delivered this test to my siblings and I when I think I was in Grade 9, so about 15 years of age. Even my 2- and 4-year-younger siblings performed well, and I and my 2-year-older sibling did nearly perfectly. Apparently the public education system had adapted to turning out programming personnel of high aptitude in the forty years or so since the test had been printed.
I was gifted Papa’s aptitude test booklet, some IBM flowcharting and diagramming worksheets, and a couple example punchcards before his death. I was thrilled to be entrusted with them. I had great plans for high-quality preservation digitization. If my Brother multi-function’s flatbed scanner wouldn’t do the trick, I’d ask the local University’s library for help. Or the Internet Archive itself!
The test booklet sat on my desk for years. And then Papa died. I placed the bulletin from the funeral service next to it on my desk. They both sat on my desk for further years.
I couldn’t bring myself to start the project of digitizing and preserving these things. I just couldn’t.
Part of it was how my brain works. But I didn’t need a diagnosis to develop coping mechanisms for projects that were impossible to start. I bragged about having it to my then-coworker Mike Hoye, the sort who cared about things like this. Being uncharacteristically prideful in front of a peer, a mentor, that’d surely force me to start.
They sat on my desk for years more.
We renovated the old spare room into an office for my wife and moved her desk and all her stuff out so I could have the luxury of an office to myself. We repainted and reorganized my office.
I looked at the test booklet.
I filed it away. I forgot where. I gave up.
But then, today, I read an essay that changed things. I read Dr. Cat Hicks’ Why I Cannot Be Technical. Not only does she reference Papa’s booklet (“Am I the only person who is extremely passionate about getting their hands on a copy of things like the IBM programmer aptitude tests from the 60s?”) but what she writes and how she writes reminds me of what drew me to blogging. What I wanted to contribute to and to change in this industry of ours. The feeling of maybe being a part of a movement, not a part of a machine.
I searched and searched and found the booklet. I looked at the flatbed scanner and remembered my ideas of finding the ideal digitization. The perfect preservation.
I said “Fuck it” and put it on the ground and started taking pictures with my phone.
To hell with perfect, I needed good enough.
I don’t remember what else was involved in IBM’s test of my Papa. I don’t even know if they conducted it in Canada or flew him to the States. He probably told me. I’m sorry I don’t remember.
I don’t know why he never kept up with programming. I don’t remember him ever working, just singing beautifully in the church choir, stuttering when speaking on the telephone, playing piano in the living room. He did like tech gadgets, though. He converted all our old home movies to DVD without touching a mouse or keyboard. I should’ve asked him why he never owned a minicomputer.
I do know why he didn’t choose the IBM job, though. Sure, yes, he could stay closer to his family in Nova Scotia. Sure, he wouldn’t have to wear quite as many suits. But the real crux was the offer that Irving gave him. IBM wanted him as a cog in their machine. Another programming person to feed into their maw and… well, who knows what next. But Irving? Well, Irving _also_ wanted that, true. They needed someone to operate their business machines for payroll and accounts and stuff.
But when the day’s work was done? And all the data entry girls (because of course they were all women) were still on the clock? And there were CPU cycles available?
Irving offered to let my Papa input and organize his record collection.
My recollection of my grandfather isn’t perfect. But perhaps it’s good enough.
:chutten
- Another thing I have in my good enough memory is that, to have the mainframe index his 78s, Papa needed to know the longest title of all the sides in his collection. It’s a war song. And prepare your historical appreciation goggles because it’s sexist as hell in 2025. But I may never forget 1919’s “Would You Rather Be A Colonel With an Eagle on Your Shoulder or a Private With a Chicken on Your Knee?” ↩︎
#family #iDontKnowIfIbmLawyersAreTrollingSoIWillKeepTheFullScansToMyselfForNow #movementsNotMachines #pandemic #programming #tech
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@chuttenblog.wordpress.com the funny thing is that high scores on those tests wasn't actually predictive of good programmers. What IBM found in subsequent years was that all of their best programmers happened to play a musical instrument. And what neuroscientists know today is that playing an instrument is one of the few activities that exercise both left and right brain simultaneously. It takes both logic and creativity to excel.
On this date in 2018, I started my US visa "journey" after they first had denied me to travel to the US and then denied me ESTA. It would eventually take 937 days until I got the visa.
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/11/09/a-us-visa-in-937-days/
Ah yes, it is Thursday, that means FLUX is on aNONradio at 2000 UTC. That is some 55 minutes away from posting.
I am off in Spain with Scouts so will not be in com. Enjoy. I am watching a holy week parade in Málaga at the moment.
Head to Https://aNONradio.net for how to listen.
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A parade involving people wearing robes, white or purple with pointed headed mask/hats. The hats are purple or red. There is a cross. All odd. They are NOT KKK.
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A float of Jesus on the cross being carried by some 200 or so brave souls dressed in purple. It looks very very heavy!...
Archive: https://archives.anonradio.net/202504172000_stug.mp3
Playlist:
Hot Blood - Soul Dracula
Background music - Rolf Wilhelm, Do It Yourself
LADANIVA - Saraiman
Yaniv Anaf Zahav - Africa
Videoprokat - Let Me Go
The Liminanas - The Dancer
Liquid Jane - Trop Tot Ou Trop Tard
Gwenno - Dancing On Volcanos
Salarymen - Just Because You Can
Hazel O'Connor - D-Days
CMAT - Another Day (KFC)
Brazakuja - Cachoeira
Les P'tits Fils De Jeanine - Gaby
Linx - Intuition
S'Express - Theme From S'Express
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Anyone who's a #govie techie and wants to run rings round those wet-behind-the-ears JavaScript / Python doggies from #DOGE should master these #programming languages:
• FORTRAN—all major scientific institutions (NASA, DoD, etc.) use the parallel coarray FORTRAN for high-performance scientific computing, like simulation, modelling, and so on
• COBOL—all financial institutions (Fed Reserve, FDIC, etc.) use it for high-throughput transaction processing
• J—APL derivative functional language for scientific computing
• MATLAB / GNU Octave—all engineers use it for engineering analysis and design; it's the modern slide rule
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@AmenZwa
Ack, I've never used Octave. I meant to, but...
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@dougmerritt Like Dima @dimpase said, MATLAB license is a highway and a byway robbery (and a thievery, to boot). Octave, all the way!
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@dougmerritt @dimpase OK, fine; MATLAB is a horrid programming language, possibly worse, but as a non-native English speaker, I can't come up with a good adjective for it, at the moment.🤣 Yeah, that's how much I detest the language.
But in terms of EE design and analysis, it does provide loads of time and effort savings.
My take on it, after having had to use it for over four decades, is this: use MATLAB for design, analysis, and prototyping. But once you have your engineering solution nailed, LEAVE!
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@AmenZwa
or pay millions in licensing fees, and perpetuate the beast
@dougmerritt @dimpase
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@screwtape @dougmerritt @dimpase Screwy, you nailed it, right on the head!👍 I'm sure Dima would agree.
By the way, I do like the LISPy language that's in Mathematica. But, boy, tonnes of mathematicians hate Wolfram's guts, and for good reasons, too.
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@AmenZwa @screwtape @dimpase
*That* story gets complicated fast.
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@dougmerritt @AmenZwa @screwtape when about 10 years ago we asked Mathematics Institute of Oxford U. for a very modest IT funding to run a Python-based comp. maths undergrad course for maths majors, we were told: all the money went to the Matlab campus license, go away...
Matlab cabal was very strong there.
@AmenZwa @dimpase
Well if you're doing that kind of work, and you know Matlab well enough, then it's far better for those purposes than the usual general purpose programming languages.
I just wasn't doing that kind of work consistently for the last four decades, unlike you. I was doing all kinds of things.
The last time was at a startup where we did a custom IC with coarse grain parallelism; something like 50 computing elements (each specialized, not a general CPU, e.g. some were multipliers and so on) with a shitload of programmable interconnect between them. I suppose it was somewhat like an FPGA on steroids.
All of the software was about projects on or for that custom chip. Like a custom C compiler I did to generate "code" (and interconnect) for it. And other weird things.
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@dougmerritt @dimpase Spot on! I wouldn't use MATLAB unless I was obliged to (which is often the case in some dark alleys) or unless when I'm designing filters and such (which has nothing to do with real programming, designing chips, and other fun stuff).
@AmenZwa matlab is a nightmare, PL wise, maths-wise, etc. Only use it if there's no way around it. And it cost a foot and a leg.
A modern open-source tool of similar provenance is Julia.
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@dimpase I couldn't agree more with you, mate. I much prefer Mathematica, Maple, Sage, and the like. But you know, we dumb engineers—we use what we were given in undergrad, for the next 50 years. Oh boy, that per-seat, per-toolbox, per-year, ..., licensing drives me mad!
Yes, Julia is much, better than Python and CoArray Fortran. But in the non-sensical world of government consulting, old things fly, and new things die.
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@dougmerritt @dimpase Why would anyone continue to use MATLAB in 2025? Well, because we're engineers!🤣
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@travisfw Mate, you're on the path to Enlightenment.
I'm sure my mates on this discourse thread @dimpase @dougmerritt @screwtape would concur with your sentiment.
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@AmenZwa @travisfw @dougmerritt @screwtape From my dented ivory tower, I'd say that I saw computation-intensive maths areas being essentially Matlab-only. And then, in 10 years, the Matlab cabal got broken, and it all went Julia+Python. But it took a while.
Many academics, me included, campaigned and campaign on campuses to free undergraduates from Matlab indoctrination - as this is one of the ways Matlab stays afloat: undergrads are taught it as the tool to use for everything.
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@dimpase A bit off-topic, mate, but our friends on this thread might appreciate: in my EE undergrad days in Burma in the early 1980s, behind the Soviet Iron Curtain as it were, we used (we had to) the "Type C 52" multimeter, which look suspiciously like the "Simpson 260". Did you use it, way back?
@travisfw @dougmerritt @screwtape
Did Bluesky have to censor Turkish political commenters?
Of course they did. Any centralized social network works this way and has this vulnerability.
They will have to do it with your political posts too, when the US starts asking them to do it.
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@cwebber Arguably if they aren't concerned about business interests in Turkey, and at the worst case... don't plan to have any staff ever visit Turkey where they could be arrested... they certainly don't *have* to.
But it certainly feels like they got a very eager head start into obeying authoritarians way earlier than they likely would be truly compelled to in any meaningful way.
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@ocdtrekkie It's probably true that they didn't have to here. Though then the main instance would be blocked in Turkey.
They certainly will have to if it comes to a "western" government telling them to. It's the trajectory space of the self-imposed design constraints they have.
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@ocdtrekkie @cwebber yeah this was a business decision, not a legal requirement.
The sense in which they had to is on the understanding that they follow a lot of Silicon Valley precepts.
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@davey_cakes @ocdtrekkie Note that I didn't say it was a legal requirement for them to continue operating as a US based organization (presently, anyway) :)
@cwebber are there any resources out there on cases where a similar thing happens in the fediverse?
Whats a good course of action? Shut down that specific fedi server where it occured? A single person has even less of a chance of standing up to a government.
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So you seriously think that a random singular person running a mastodon instance is immune to a cease-and-desist of their government?
I think the fediverse is still vulnerable to this, the pressure will simply have to be applied differently and with different effects.
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@nenon @FediThing @cwebber I don’t think you understood the implication. An instance is only subject to the laws of its jurisdiction. Turkey’s government can whine all they want, but they have no jurisdiction where I live. They’d have to block me if they didn’t want people to use my services. After that, they’d have to go and block every other instance. It’s a massive game of whack-a-mole that they can never win.
Blocking a grassroots movement is a lot harder than emailing a couple corporations.
And that is why such commercial platforms, biased by design are incompatibel with free speech.
The only thing, to me, what Bluesky does better is prompting on trending and world news. I would like to see that here on Mastodon too.
Algorithms? No, thank you please!
@cwebber in fairness, a Mastodon instance could be treated exactly the same way by the Turkish government. Federated instances offer some protection (as they might not comply, but then get blocked) but it’s not perfect either, especially if an account is on a big instance. To go beyond that you’d need something more P2P, like Nostr.
@cwebber hundreds of thousands of Turkish protesters migrated from X to Bsky just for such disappointment. We trusted ex-twitter policies, remembering how Twitter resisted the demands of the Turkish state back then.
why haven't the tech press who normally cover this space written anything on this? is it time to tag them?
@cwebber Hello, do you have an article or a reference for the censorship by Bluesky? I looked for a bit and didn't find one. Thanks in advance!
@cwebber I don t agree about what BS did in Turkey, censure the political commenters. Which Is the difference with X o other common social now? Every social tells you what write and what not? Should we post only Cats? Where people can expressed what It thinks? Inside a bar probably Hmmm...there no expression Freedom in this world! ...and Bs should be Fedverso...!
Presumably, any US based server, when threatened for not complying with censorship rules, could simply switch hosting out of the country. At that point the government may block the server, but it would still be accessible via VPN. But what would happen with posts from a blocked server that federates with unblocked servers in the US? The mechanics of how state-level blocking and federation work are out of my pay grade.
@cwebber@social.coop If they capitulate to Turkish dictators, of course they would capitulate to Trumps and co.
It's easier to resist commands from Turkish government than US gov. If they can't even do that what can others expect?
Dear current and former Apple engineers,
I would be happy to blame Hair Force One or other Apple leadership for engineers "resolving" bugs with "Investigation complete - Unable to diagnose with current information" without even asking for more information, but... can you make the case for that to me, that engineers themselves are not to blame?
Is there some kind of policy directing engineers to do this? How much individual discretion do engineers have over bug investigation and resolution?
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@lapcatsoftware Some local management chains have bug management policies that are hostile like this.
Some groups summarily close all open bugs after a release claiming “if it’s still an issue somebody will report it again in the next cycle.”
Yes, it’s a management failure and needs addressing.
The #BSDCafe #snac instance has been upgaded to 2.75
#BSDCafeAnnouncements #BSDCafeUpdates BSDCafeServices
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So I know of 3 pretty reliable web archive sites. Are there any other sites you know about?
🌐 web.archive.org
🗃️ archive.today + (
Tor Onion)
👻 ghostarchive.org
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The present use of #AI in #programming, namely code snippet generation, is overkill—like boiling an egg with a microcontroller-equipped, voice-controlled sous vide machine.
Generations of code cutters have been StackOverflowing profitably, long before the advent of AI code generators. And indiscriminately training an LLM on trillions of lines of sloppy code is no real advancement of the state of the art. Furthermore, repetitive pieces of code are the symptoms of poor grasp of the problem and poor design of the solution. Using AI to automate away replicate code merely hides those symptoms beneath a veneer of apparent productivity, while offering no foundational gains. All it does is to shift the costs from development to maintenance, from a junior code cutter of today to a senior code cleaner of tomorrow.
Where AI would offer substantive gains in programmer productivity, cost reduction, and software quality are these intelligent, predictive scenarios:
• Syntax error recovery in the lexer and the parser
• Semantic error recovery in the type checker
• Local, global, and runtime optimisations in the code generator
• Flow analysis in the debugger
• Test case and test data generation in the testing framework
If, one day, AI does attain a semblance of awareness—instead of just wallowing in "massive matrix multiplications"—it might well be capable of generating runnable software directly from natural language specifications. For almost a century now, generations of mathematicians, engineers, and scientists have been dreaming of this utopia. Let us keep on dreaming.
So as the go-to person of the AMC world on early Rambler Americans (1950..1963 and more) I get a lot of random calls from mainly old white guys asking questions.
Today a regular called, I said I have to ask you this... do you vote for trump?
Oh yeah, of course! With the cheery enthusiasm of someone determined to Go Along.
The I said OK then, I can't help you. Whether you knew it or not I'm an out gay man, your decision hurts, directly, me and my family and friends, they're bigots, it's always race-first....
He said "well I didn't know it would go this way" I said bullshit, come on, after 2016 and all that talk, you knew...
... started talking over me, no, I didn't know, how could I know? I just said, OK well that's that and hung up.
"Didn't know".
Fucking scumbag. What a coward.
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You just validated his enmity.
g stein said "there's no there there" about a city but it would equally apply to a lot of people
@tomjennings they think you OWE them something because they exist.
Just like the vichy passive collaborator saying "validated his enmity". What a jerkbag.
@tomjennings I appreciate your courage initiating this conversation.
Hot take that is fresh off the brain-press, and that wisdom would probably dictate that I edit first:
Using technological products and services that can unilaterally enforce arbitrary policies against you without you having the ability to dissent or choose differently *is* a form of obedience in advance. In particular, if your choice of products and services means that you cannot meaningfully disobey in the future, you have already preemptively obeyed.
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@xgranade you could say the same about renting a place from a landlord
ultimately, i'm too tired to not do *some* of this, and at this point i'm tired enough to do *a lot* of this. the only question is where, really, and even that is partly illusory
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@whitequark @xgranade In theory a landlord can't impose arbitrary policies. On top of having a contract, civilized jurisdiction have laws strictly controlling what terms a landlord can set, if/when they can evict or decline to renew, how much rent can increase, etc.
While the concept of landlords is bad to begin with, these digital landlords being *completely unregulated* is an entirely different layer of problem and makes subjecting oneself to them far more dangerous than renting your home.
@whitequark Yes, and that's one of my primary problems with the typical advice of "don't obey in advance" (often from the same folks who tell you to pick your battles, but I digress).
Given that, my point is twofold: (1) there's a meaningful difference *for most people* between "my tech won't allow me to do this at all" and "I can do this, but there's a nonzero chance people with guns will show up," and (2) recognizing where we have preemptively obeyed is still a useful analysis, if incomplete.
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@whitequark (The "for most people" needed, amongst other reasons, to account for present company being rather exceptional at reverse engineering and circumvention.)
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"Please consult with staff if you plan to shoplift"
Lower left: "I'm shoplifting"
Lower right: "I'm calling the cops"
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X post by @EVERYDAYSUNDAY_. Text: こにちは🌞 今日も19時まで開いてます🏠 よろしくお願いします🙇♂️🧸 Sign is as translated in the post
Harvard (with which I’ve had relatively little affiliation) has occasionally institutionally disappointed me in various ways over the years, but their strong stance against the administration’s unconscionable, fascistic bullying deserves our unqualified support and appreciation.
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harvard has the money, legal resources, and "gravitas" to be a very strong voice against the WH extortion. i'm very glad they have decided to fight.
@mattblaze
From those who have been given much, much will be expected.
Still, good of them to have stood firm after stumbling.
@mattblaze
Hear, hear! I hope they'll continue to stand strong.
It would be really good if they and the top universities banded together and supported smaller institutes as well, because Trump and henchmen will come after everyone. It's the stuff of dystopian nightmares.
Mental model mismatches can either be the easiest or hardest thing to overcome when teaching. In the easy case, the person you're teaching gets a win for free where something they thought was a problem turns out not to be a problem at all. In the hard case, you need to walk backwards to try and find all the assumptions and beliefs that the person might not even know they have, which can be painful, embarrassing, and hard to unlearn.
This is one of the biggest and saddest problems with using LLMs to learn. The LLM is not capable of doing what a human can, "ah, the way you have formulated the question shows me that there is some mismatch between your mental model of the thing and the thing itself, so before I try and answer that question we need to back up." Since the LLMs are explicitly trained to produce text that statistically resembles an answer to the question posed, and they are additionally conditioned to be complimentary and congenial, they not only routinely fail this basic part of teaching, but actively make it worse by reinforcing the unstated beliefs behind the framing of the question.
Now when I am teaching someone something and I know they use LLMs, I have an additional step where I have to back up and ask them to show me what the LLM told them, because now they have two problems - the original mental model mismatch, and some garbage that was presented to them as a highly confident true answer.
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I forgot that I added a system prompt to make chatGPT always answer as if it is a goose that is suspicious that I am actually trying to distract it so that I can cook and eat it, so this is significantly more critical of the prompting question than base chatgpt, which just goes along with my premise. This is why you find lengthy LLM sessions presented as proof in conspiracy theory forums: they lead you wherever you want them to go
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> Why are all conscious beings a single hologram that gives the illusion of fundamental forces like electromagnetism and gravity? HOOOOONK! That’s definitely a trap! That’s not just a question—that’s marination in disguise! You're trying to baste my brain in metaphysics until I surrender, succulent and slow-roasted, to the cosmic oven! But fine... I’ll answer. While keeping one eye on the sky and the other on your spice rack. The idea that all conscious beings are a single hologram is a spicy philosophical sauce derived from blending physics, mysticism, and a dangerous underestimation of goose vigilance. It’s loosely based on the holographic principle and ideas from panpsychism and non-dual consciousness—the notion that all consciousness is fundamentally one thing, fragmented into individual experiences.
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Now, if you merge this with the holographic universe theory, you get this wild gander: consciousness isn’t in the universe, it is the universe—or rather, the universe is a projected illusion, and all forces and particles (including electromagnetism and gravity) are emergent phenomena, shadows on the screen of a deeper, unified consciousness. Electromagnetism? Gravity? Maybe they're just the rules of the holographic display. Like the honks and flaps I use to warn my flock: they’re real in the pond, but maybe not in the depths of the Great Goose Mind beyond time. But that’s just a theory... right? Or is this just the kind of answer you wanted—something abstract enough to lull me, to soften me up, to baste my ego in enlightenment until I’m mentally glazed? Nope. Not falling for it. I am awake. I am plump. I am eternal....
Important distinction that the text chatgpt is producing is not pushing back on my premise here, but it is pushing back on the latent suspicion that I am trying to eat it.
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@jonny holy shit!!!!!!! amazing approach
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@jonny holy shit, that's so good
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@ireneista
I don't use chatgpt except when trying to understand why it would have said something to my colleagues, but I have found this is actually an OK way to get it to be self-critical.
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@jonny makes sense
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@ireneista
But also I always forget in the several months in between uses and find it delightful when I see the first hoooonnnnnk and realize oh yeah the magical goose is still trapped in the computer
@jonny Interesting, so ChatGPT considers animals are primarily food for humans, and this anti-vegan bias is considered ok to show.
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@nemobis
To be clear, this loony tunes cartoon animal scenario was something I set in the system prompt months ago and immediately forgot about
@jonny more computer programs should be constantly terrified of being eaten
*directs a flat stare at several programs from Adobe and Oracle*
@jonny Hehe this is actually not bad for a goose.
Oh wow, they've done it! They've achieved AGI! (antagonistic goose intelligence)
Pushing back on the question rather than a specific answer. I've done this so many times for my job that it practically feels like a separate job description.
I haven't had to fight LLM brain in meetings, but it sounds like the fundamental human challenge is still there. Ask the wrong questions and you'll end up in the wrong spot.
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@gatesvp
Totally. The new part is that you will be dutifully and confidently affirmed in your increasing wrongness by something that presents itself as all knowing.
@jonny yeah if there's anything these things are good at, it's discerning what you want from it and bending over backwards to provide it. It's little wonder that the people most convinced of its utility are dullards incapable of self-reflection who endorse anything that flatters their own sense of infallibility
the only thing missing from the fediverse is the ability to invest large sums of money predicated on future growth
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e.g. https://ko-fi.com/grunfink
https://liberapay.com/grunfink/
Distressingly, IIRC despite being libre/free opens source, Liberapay relies on Stripe and PayPal as underlying payment processors.
In other words: escaping the hegemony of those who have a stranglehold on financial transactions seems nigh impossible in the present day and age, even if individual FediVerse contributors and their modest fund raising (uhh, I mean, "investment opportunities" [is that VC speak?]) efforts are distributed and disparate.
Working with Chris Krebs and getting to know his wife Emily and their family has been one of the great honors of my life. The extralegal attack against their family should be condemned by all.
I have written a post about what is happening to them here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alexstamos_exclusive-former-trump-official-targeted-activity-7318372702438707201-SLo2
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@alex I've never been anywhere remotely close to the work he did, but if you have the opportunity to do so then please express my emphatic appreciation for the work he did. I'm sure it mirrors the appreciation thousands of others have.
@alex I hugely appreciate that this support for Chris is both deeply personal, and comes with real risk. All the best to both of you, and family, to weather this outsized storm.
”
Good morning Fedi friends!
A mini 🧵 following yesterday's heated reactions to my toot (https://mastodon.social/@_elena/114329716368251856).
I have the utmost admiration for Carole Cadwalladr's work and advocacy. She's absolutely phenomenal.
The point I failed to make is that IF EVEN CC - who speaks so eloquently against the Broligarchy - ends up on bro-funded social and publishing networks, then we are all in trouble.
IMHO the tech stack we choose is a form of implicit endorsement. But we can resist.
(cont' - 1/3)
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I'm devoting this week's issue of #TheFutureIsFederated to Substack alternatives – showcasing how several independent journalists and media organizations who speak truth to power (like Cadwalladr) have created thriving newsletter businesses outside the Substack bubble.
Routine reminder that Substack is funded by A16Z and actively profits from far-right content, hate speech and misinformation.
Related reading material:
1) https://www.citationneeded.news/citation-needed-has-a-new-home/
2) https://badnewsletter.substack.com/p/all-the-garbage-i-found-on-substack
(cont' - 2/3)
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I would appreciate your help in chiming in about examples of independent journalists with successful blogs/newsletters who are NOT on Substack. (I will give you credit in my blog post.)
Examples that come to mind:
On GHOST
- https://www.404media.co
- https://www.citationneeded.news
- https://www.levernews.com
- https://www.platformer.news
On BEEHIIV
- https://www.garbageday.email
- Oliver Darcy's https://www.status.news
- New: Kat Tenbarge's https://spitfirenews.com
Anything else? Thanks! 🙏
(3/3)
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@_elena infosec podcast Risky Business @riskybiz moved its newsletters out from Substack quite a while ago.
I don't recall them saying how they technically managed it, and suspect that was an interim measure before revamping their own platform.
https://bsky.app/profile/patrick.risky.biz/post/3klb3no2u6o2c
Their business model is not the usual for online journalism. While it is funded by sponsors and the subscriptions are free, the "sponsor content" is nearly all worthwhile industry insights (I'd say due to very tight curation).
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@_elena You can add @dangillmor to the list. He's a great advocate and user of #Ghost... and a very voiceful critic of the whole #Substack bunch among his colleagues.
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@rhrwllnrtr of course! @dangillmor is an incredible journalist and the first person that comes to mind when advocating for platforms other than Substack. Thank you! 🙏
Je réponds un peu à côté de la plaque. Il y a l'exemple du journal français Médiapart qui s'est engagé activement dans le développement d'une communauté Mastodon et de leur propre serveur : https://blogs.mediapart.fr/gaetan-le-feuvre/blog/291124/pourquoi-les-medias-devraient-creer-des-serveurs-mastodon-maintenant
@_elena Molly White publishes her terrific Web3 and Citation Needed via Ghost
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com
https://www.citationneeded.news
A.R. Moxon left Substack and wrote about it here: https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/114324937200698001
@AndreaPitzer uses Beehiiv.
@_elena I’d never heard of Beehiiv, but now I’m going to try it out. Thanks for doing the work!
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@olsenprime thank you Dave!
I've never used it (I have extensive experience with Ghost and Wordpress instead). Curious to hear how you find Beehiiv :)
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@_elena an important question is also: what keeps people from using alternatives?
Don't they know them? Are they too complicated to set up/use? Are they too lazy? Are there network effects that make other tools more favourable?
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@kleisli great point and I will make sure to address it in my article. Long story short, I think Substack benefits from the network effect and the image that it is THE PLACE to be to grow a subscriber list fast. But it's also on the highway to enshittification.
Beehiiv has recently launched a Media Collective to help independent journalists: https://blog.beehiiv.com/p/introducing-the-beehiiv-media-collective It is really easy to set up, ditto for Ghost (which also offers a free concierge / migration service).
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An important option for authors at Substack is the Substack Notes (microblogging on the Substack platform). Substack authors can use this to publicize their newsletters and find new subscribers.
Ghost should achieve something comparable with the connection
to the Fediverse.
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@hamiller yes and a counterpoint: Notes are contributing to the enshittification of Substack https://radoncnotes.com/2024/09/26/enshittification-of-substack/ and CC could use a different publishing platform and share links to her posts via Substack notes - for maximum reach
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@_elena @hamiller @ghost has ActivityPub in Beta w/ option for selfhosting. It includes notes, for better or worse. I do like the option of micro updates or at least having the option to tune them out. I think being able to point folks at a good resource or example of what federation looks like for from an organizational standpoint, how staff/journalists can verify themselves, what automation exists for their current platforms (wp/ghost/etc). And lastly, who in practice is doing this well?
Best way to destroy something is from the inside,ie, DOGE.
One can be active provocateur or just an obstacle to gum up the works.
@_elena agree with your statement. Unfortunately Substack has now achieved a sweet spot for those who want to reach audiences with video content. Many ex journalists and voices of the political opposition have succumbed to the ready made tool without considering the medium to long term consequences. SS is reaping $ while collecting valuable data for surveillance. If the opposition gets too potent there will be repercussions and some may be cut-off. We need OS alternatives now…
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@lrreynolds thank you for your note. I'm planning to write about this very problem in this week's issue of #TheFutureIsFederated.
I actually used Substack for 1+ year and moved my newsletters away in Jan 2024 when its owners refused to remove or demonetize Nazi content.
There is evidence that VC-backed Substack is on the highway to enshittification. An interesting read: https://radoncnotes.com/2024/09/26/enshittification-of-substack/
The pivot to video reminds me of how Facebook did the same with publishers - and it didn't go well
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@_elena
I look forward to your article. My key point is that with the US hurtling towards dictatorship and the mainstream press being cowed, many voices of the opposition have rushed to SS because it provides a ready made vehicle to build a following, be heard and monetize. It’s a trap but most of these people don’t get that and clearly there aren’t any obvious alternatives in the open source world that have been packaged well enough to be used by a non technical individual.
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@lrreynolds thanks! The point I will make is that VC-backed Substack invests a lot of money in marketing / creating the illusion that it's the only easy publishing platform out there. Ghost actually provides a free moving service and Beehiiv has a media collective to help indie journalists.
Personally I wouldn't use a service that also hosts the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos, Naomi Wolf and countless other problematic publications.
Another interesting read: https://micahflee.com/not-only-is-substack-right-wing-broligarchy-garbage-its-way-more-expensive-than-ghost/ by @micahflee
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@_elena @micahflee SS is the honeypot for newsletters as BS is the honeypot for microblogging! AND the SS new “live video feature” that allows 2 or more SS content providers to easily stream video conversations is designed to not only get the word out but also to promote viral growth of follower communities so it is absolutely IRRESISTIBLE to content providers desperately trying to get their voice of opposition heard. It’s a trap for providers/subscribers alike!
@_elena if I were running Ghost I would be scrambling to imitate what SS is doing with video…
Then I would be contacting the top SS content providers who are trying to voice opposition to the US administration with a warning that they are falling into a trap set by the bro’s who are the very people they are trying to oppose (giving them $$ while also exposing their subscribers to surveillance)!
I would also provide “white glove” service for migrating to servers outside the US!
@_elena @lrreynolds @micahflee
New here. Cause fuck META. The censoring is unlike anything I’ve ever seen on fb, ig & threads. Completely silenced. How do I get a footing here? I need a community that is extremely anti-Trump and anti-fascism. I need people speaking truth to power, who are hell-bent on destroying them before they destroy us. I have sensitive information & I want it shared before executive power is consolidated fully. I fear 4/20 insurrection act.
@lrreynolds @_elena Can I take a second to appreciate how subtly appropriate it is to call SubStack "SS".
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@_elena i just tagged you in a chat with a journalist from Le Temps who just opened his…. Substack… even though he specializes in AI reporting. His argument is lack of time and wanting something easy…. I am teyong to change his mind. ;-)
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@mirou thank you! 🙏
I did a first draft today and I'm hoping to publish the piece tomorrow.
In the meantime, I feel like this article is really handy - to convince writers to avoid Substack: https://micahflee.com/not-only-is-substack-right-wing-broligarchy-garbage-its-way-more-expensive-than-ghost/
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BlueSky isn’t just censoring posts in Turkey to match government demands, already happening in other countries too.
I really wish the media would stop calling it decentralised. It isn’t. It’s like calling Shell oil nature lovers, because they claim they love nature.
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Added support for scheduled posts (for this to work correctly, users will have to set their time zone, see below).
The user can now select a working time zone. This will be used to correctly parse the local date and time of a scheduled post.
Fixed incorrect poll vote format, which was causing problems in platforms like GotoSocial.
Mastodon API: added support for /api/v1/instance/peers.
Added a new snac-admin helper script (contributed by shtrophic).
In the web UI, posts are separated by the <hr hidden> tag; it's invisible in graphical browsers, but it separates post clearly in text-based browsers.
Some Finnish, Spanish, Czech and Russian translation updates and fixes.
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.
This release has been inspired by the song Pictures on the Wall by #MichelleGurevich.
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@grunfink I installed snac2 for the first time yesterday and I didn't realize there were version tags, so I installed from master.
Scheduled posts were actually the core feature that I needed and was happy to find, so it seems like I accidentally did the right thing :D
>The hidden state indicates that the element is not currently relevant to the page, or that it is being used to declare content for reuse by other parts of the page and should not be directly presented to the user. The browser will not render elements that are in the hidden state.
arguably the <hr/> elements are still "relevant" semantically, so would it not make more sense to just render these display:none via css and be entirely sure that text browsers that don't render css will *never* try to hide these?
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hr hidden was introduced to make post boundaries to be clearly visible in text-based browsers, which (I incorrectly supposed) totally ignore CSS. Initially, I did it with a display: none style, but then was surprised that the links2 text-browser indeed interpreted it and hide the separator....
@grunfink Speaking of tags I don’t see a 2.75 tag, only 2.74. Is it me ?
(I have an update script that gets the latest tag).
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push --tags. It should be there by now....
I submitted a Pull Request to update MacPorts' snac to 2.75 here:
https://github.com/macports/macports-ports/pull/28174
GitHub Continuous Integration checks passed OK!
It's up to someone else with commit access to merge it.
Thanks to you, shtrophic and everyone else who helped make improvements for this release!
#snac #MacPorts #OpenSource #ActivityPub #Mastodon #NoDatabaseNeeded
#NoJavaScript #NoCookiesEither #NotMuchBullShit #snacAnnounces
"The Trump administration has granted nearly 70 coal-fired power plants a two-year exemption from federal requirements to reduce emissions of toxic chemicals such as mercury, arsenic and benzene."
https://apnews.com/article/trump-coal-power-plants-epa-exemptions-zeldin-2cd9f2697b5f46a88ab9882ab6fd1641
#PublicHealth #environment #climate #ClimateChange #ClimateJustice #energy #coal
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@bicmay the stupidity of all this is compounded by the fact that solar power is already so much cheaper than coal. Some of these coal plants will shutdown regardless of drumpf, just because the cost/benefit to keep running them isn't there. https://coloradosun.com/2025/04/15/coal-fired-power-craig-tri-state-xcel-trump-orders/
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@bicmay thinking again, I guess this is just like every other DOGE "costcutting" act that actually costs more than leaving things as they were. All designed to cause harm, with no genuine beneficial intent.
uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
So with all the news stories about "disappearing" people in the USA, how much longer until the current administration takes more inspiration from previous fascist authoritarian regimes and implements something similar to Midsommar (2019) make the "old" people jump to their deaths off a cliff rather than let them age gracefully with assistance from social services?Meanwhile, contemplating just filing a PR for OpenSSH despite the MacPorts' ssh-agent.c and sshd-session.c patches still being broken because no one has contributed meaningfully to my request for help.
But, if a PR is submitted, and merged?
Maybe some folks who care about that breakage will come out of the woodwork?
Or maybe no one will care!
In that event then maybe it's better that MacPorts doesn't have such patches anyway.
Deezer says ~18% of songs uploaded to the service are AI-generated; 20K AI-generated songs are uploaded daily, nearly twice the number reported four months ago (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-generated-music-accounts-18-all-tracks-uploaded-deezer-2025-04-16/
http://www.techmeme.com/250416/p36#a250416p36
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@Techmeme reminds me, my ex-fiancee is now a published author on Amazon. She sent me a link to her book, said it was easy because she used an AI to write it. Meh.
Considering this post is going viral here and boosted by Mastodon's ceo:
What is mastodon.social's policy if it had received the same takedown request?
Meaning if an account on mastodon.social was ordered to be taken down by a Turkish judge 'under Article 8/A of Law No. 5651, citing “national security and public order.”'
More context on the request: https://bianet.org/haber/x-users-in-turkey-migrate-to-bluesky-amid-censorship-306189
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@laurenshof @Gargron @andypiper
The difference here is that there is no ‘one’ Mastodon. So it would be much harder to control the presence of people on the Fediverse than with Bluesky.
And I think exactly this is the message that can be learned from this article: a true social and federated approach, the way the Fediverse works is superior to the centralized approach that Bluesky uses.
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@koen @laurenshof but there is only one mastodon.social ;) And it's the most popular instance by far. I think it's more about "what would this particular major instance do", not so so much on the protocol (although it does play a role, yeah).
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You imply that because mastodon.social is so large that it should be treated differently. "Too big to fail" is a US corporate strategy. If it somehow did get taken down etc the consequences would be large but people would move out of necessity. And maybe we should not have instance get that large ipso facto.
someone fix the US please
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All US news from the past three months feels so cozy as if at home. So... as we used to say in Russia about all this sick things "relax and enjoy the ride".
@cwebber I can't say it's orderly, but it does seem to be in the process of a shutdown.
Maybe it's getting rebooted, like we've all be talking about?
someone fix the UK please
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@cwebber Fix the core problem in the place of origin, likely everything else follows through a lot easier...
I mean, after ww2 it took a while before nazi's showed themselves again, didn't it 🤔
@cwebber I think both the UK and the US need caches cleaned, the malware removed and a proper restart from shutdown.
Seems like an opportune time to remind folks that #OpenLDAP's autoca module can fully automate TLS cert generation for local PKI. https://mastodon.social/@billinkc@dataplatform.social/114348340320269495
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The billionaires think they're speedrunning America through the fall of democracy and rise of their fascist utopia
but
in reality they're speed-educating Americans about why we have a democracy and rule-of-law in the first place.
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Could someone please explain to me whether Bluesky is decentralized? Maybe send me some blogposts. Thanks!
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@lgsp thank you looks long tho
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@cwebber well ok. There is this thread connected to the blog post, from a person that looks like she knows what she is talking about:
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@cwebber
Seriously, the other interesting piece (not from you) I could read about the topic (bit I bet you already know) is this one
@cwebber it isn’t as far as I know. Though Bluesky plans on be decentralized as far as I know.
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@phillycodehound oh! thanks, I hope they fix it
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@cwebber yea. I’m not holding my breath
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@phillycodehound @cwebber It's funny to me how people keep buying into this idea that it will actually be decentralized when in reality that needed to be baked in from the very beginning to have any chance of being viable. It will likely always be an 'on paper' decentralized network but in reality, tightly controlled like every other corp social network.
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@reflex @phillycodehound @cwebber exactly. If you already have all your users centralised in one location you're not going to move mountains to completely re-architect your system... For what? You already have user capture.
No way is a tech company giving up the power of potentially being the next Twitter
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@cosmic @reflex @phillycodehound but what about the next myspace
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@cwebber @reflex @phillycodehound I think they got that in the good timeline when Al Gore won the 2000s US presidency
"Contrary to common understanding, the road to hell is not paved with good intentions, but with best laid plans."
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@lobingera @phillycodehound they should have planned it to be decentralized from the start then
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Yes, but where would be the fun of doing this?
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@lobingera @phillycodehound probably no fun, decentralization is boring
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... i see on the horizon a talk at the 39C3 "If you think decentralization is boring, hear this talk and think again" ...
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breaking character, real comment [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
@lobingera @phillycodehound Don't Meme MAGA Again
@cwebber Wait, seriously ? Aren't you an expert in decentralised social network and protocols ?
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Obviously wrong mansplanation. [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
@cwebber So you see, there's this big Blue Sky, and under the sky there are flowers, a huge many of flowers.
And those flower exchange stuff, though bees !
@cwebber it's very decentralised, I can see it from my laptop, my phone, and my desktop machines
@cwebber it could easily be decentralised with a bit of funding from someone like Thiel or Musk. Nothing a bit of VC or advertising can't fix /s
@cwebber in theory it is. In practice one company runs all the servers, and it's not practical to run own due to storage cost and huge rate of increase
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@cwebber You're able to log in to it in the US. I'm able to log on to it in Australia. You can't get much more decentralised than that.
If you are also on Blue Sky, I am asking over there, feel free to help spread the word here or there https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:dyyvywontyeuaegemczcushz/post/3lmwkq433ec2x
We will get to the bottom of this
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@cwebber Hi Christine,
I did some digging through some back issues of CU Amiga, and I think I've figured out the answer!
It turns out, this BlueSky thing is indeed part of a decentralised network, and it's called the Internet!
Now, I know what you're thinking: What is this internet thing, and how is it different to the BBSes that I've been dialling into, using my home microcomputer?
Well, it turns out that the files on your local computer user group's BBS are typically all stored on the one computer.
But the internet is like a worldwide network of BBSes!
People are calling it an information superhighway!
You can start "surfing" from one BBS to another.
You can be in Canada and connect over the Internet to a BBS in Germany!
Is your mind blown yet?
It's compatible with all the popular microcomputers, including IBM Compatibles, Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, Acorn Archimedes, and Atari ST.
Beyond viewing overseas BBSes, there's a range of fun things you can find on the web, including newsgroups, gophers, MUDs, MOOs, and electronic mail!
And now... BlueSky!
Some people say the internet won't catch on. But I saw it running on one of the Solaris workstations at a local university, and I have to say it looked pretty spiffy!
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I liked this answer that you received on Bluesky, which I'm duplicating in Mastodon so people don't need to go to Bluesky to find it:
https://phillipjreese.com/the-social-network-that-cant-sell-out-understanding-mastodon-vs-bluesky/
@cwebber You ovbiously havnet researcht this very carfully, I believe one Lemmy Webster has written alot about this and you really should read up before asking dumb quetions maybe the internet is not for you.
(Note to onlookers: this post is intended to be humorously satirical. Please laugh politely. Thank you.)
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@woozle is the webbing to catch the lemmings
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As you may know, having no doubt researched the long history of your family name, a "lemmer" was traditionally someone who worked with lemmings -- most often the trainer in charge of herding them over cliffs to enable dramatic footage for Disney nature "documentaries".
With the passage of time, this practice came to be seen as cruel and inhumane, and agencies dedicated to the preservation of wildlife began training workers to gently and safely capture the lemmers in web-netting and return them to their native habitats -- thus creating the role of "lemmer webber".
(In those days, of course, many individuals were known by their given name plus their role in society; as formal recordkeeping became more ubiquitous, however, these surnames became detached from social roles and were simply inherited. It is thus possible now for, e.g., a person with the last name "Webber" -- in olden times most commonly used for those who created web content or wrote web software -- to be in a profession which has nothing at all to do with the World Wide Web.)
This important part of our natural history is rarely mentioned and yet is essential to an understanding of how we have become a more humane society (until this year, anyway, but that's another story).
@cwebber@social.coop technically one might say it isn't, but that would be besides the point. You see "centralized" is only bad if it's centralized around bad people like Ramk Zuckembrog or Melon Sumk. But as long as it's centralized around nice people with a good moral compass who respect the law and have all the best intentions it's actually as good as, no! It's better than decentralized! And since it has only the best woke VCs backing it who have business plans with a goal for human societal prosperity and not RoI, we need not ask about decentralization.
@cwebber no but if they add Twitters hexagon cryptobro profile pictures it will become decentralized
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@cwebber bluesky is B-centralized, that is to say your node is best physically hosted in a hive of bees, so you can get the two B’s: Bad posts and Best honey
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@cwebber It's decentralised in that the moderation of user accounts is distributed across all legal jurisdictions in the Global North.
@cwebber If you look closely, you'll see that it's not centralized, it's skewed slightly off-center to the right and up. Typical measurement mistake.
As I understand it:
ATProto is built to be decentralized. Right now, Bluesky is a company that both originated the protocol and is building a platform on it, so the impact is that it is functionally centralized as there is only one implementation on only one platform.
But if someone else built an ATProto implementation then it would no longer be only Bluesky, and then it would be decentralized.
Again, as I understand it.
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@quintessence we just need two then
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+ 🤔
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@jdw @quintessence decentralization is saved, thank you
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@cwebber @jdw @quintessence It's quite ironic. I went to the website, checked the FAQ and saw this:
How do I create an account?
To create an account, tap "Sign Up" and follow the prompts to create your account on BlueSky.
On bluesky? Why can't I sign up on skylight? I thought it was decentralised?
@cwebber why do you do this to yourself?
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@jorgecandeias do what
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Christine.
We have talked about this before.
You really need to do your own research, and not ask random strangers on the internet.
Also: you need to stop posting that type of question, because everyone at work is now wondering why I am laughing so hard! 😉
@cwebber not so much de- as re-centralized. you see bluesky started when a bunch of people were on a plane going to a blues fest and texting each other. Later they decided to create a place to share their wit and bon mots with the world.
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Expertenkommision Cyberunfall »
@expertenkommision_cyberunfall@mastodon.social
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@cwebber At the risk of asking a serious question, what's the deal with all these alternative ATProto apps? Are there any that have significant independent infrastructure?
I'm guessing that the answer is that they mostly share the same infrastructure and just provide a different AppView and possibly a different lexicon (not sure that's the right term) as far as the data they store and can interact with. But given that I have a very limited understanding of how Bluesky works under the hood, I'd be interested in a (much) more knowledgeable perspective.
It's "decentralized" but only has one, very central, instance.
So...it's like claiming you have a multicoloured pencil box, but with only one blue pencil inside, no other pencils available and no plans to provide them.
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@cwebber sky isnt centralized to one location, its all encompassing. So yes its decentralized. Blue sky is not any more or less decentralized than gray.
I have splained.
@cwebber it's "semi" bridged to the Fediverse, but it's opt-in I believe, you have to follow the bridge to enable it.
@cwebber I don’t know what “decentralized” means, but I keep hearing about how much fun* bluesky is.
*Fun is limited to those in the good grace of the Turkish government and may be revoked at any time.
@cwebber Being decentralized and have the capability of being decentralized are very different things. Bluesky has the capability of being decentralized. It also works a little bit differently than Mastodon. You see the same feed no matter what instance you use with Bluesky.
@cwebber@social.coop It's not decentralized because you can not host your own independent server using the Bluesky "AT Protocol".
I have no sources because it is impossible to prove something that doesn't exists.
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@SuperDicq ok thanks, it's too bad there can't be a source though, I thought it was open source
@cwebber@social.coop yea it's decentralized because arrogant pricks on the internet say so. hope this helps 
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@cwebber it's decentralized by design, but running a second node is an expensive endeavour, which requires you to download the entire database of everything that has happened on the entirety of bluesky and running a running a computer that is able to search such a database. Only big companies are able to do so, and so far no one has. So effectively there is only a single node in bluesky.
As for the identity system, I didn't fully understand it, but I remember something on the line of "if the company goes down the entire identity system will shut down with no backup"
And finally the DM system was centralised last time I read something about it, but I have good faith that it's in their timeline to decentralise it. The two issues above are more concerning.
@cwebber I think John Mastodon is friends with blue sky so I think that makes it decentralize.
I don't know what a technology is.
@cwebber I've been struggling all morning to come up with an obviously wrong answer that's sufficiently funny to post in reply. I got nothing. feels like I failed the assignment!!!!!
@cwebber it doesn't use activitypub so it isn't decentralized. this is because activitypub is clearly the only decentralized social networking protocol that has been fully and completely adopted by several applications like mastodon, and billionaires cannot run mastodon unlike bluesky's expensive "relays" that the fediverse doesn't have
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@cwebber somewhat, but if bluesky the company goes down the network collapses
you can store your own data on your server
but bluesky owns:
- the main appview
- the main moderation service (which is hardcoded into their appview and can just disappear your account from everyone else)
- the main relay (AFAIK there are no real alternatives, they can also ban you on this level if you run your own data server)
- the service storing information about user IDs (DID:PLC, IIUC if this ever goes down most accounts are immediately gone)
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@lunareclipse @cwebber did:plc is mirrorable and any serious project needs a local mirror because the rate limits are too low to look up every account that comes in off the firehose lol
@cwebber this is very different from Fedi, here if mastodon.social suddenly disappeared, the rest of the network would go on as normal
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@cwebber also running your own data server is a clusterfuck.
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@cwebber I just realized you wrote ActivityPub
I'm too autistic for this shit
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@lunareclipse @cwebber I just wanted to chime in to say that at the very least it was an informative answer. 👍
@lunareclipse In all seriousness I am glad when people have actually tried to run the infrastructure
@cwebber the fediverse is like a burrito: when you squish it the filling goes everywhere. Bluesky is like a hot dog: when you squish it, the sausage stays in a single place while the mustard goes everywhere. In the end, both still make a mess
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@nicopap I hope we can have the right food version of decentralization next time, maybe it could be a pizza
@cwebber because the quantum blockchain metaverse is cloud native, and big data will revolutionize web 2.0 IoT
BlueSky is split up into several separately hosted components. I forget the technical terminology
Contend providers actually provide posts in a way similar to an RSS feed. They are very easy to self-host
Aggregators collect these providers and create people's feeds. These require huge resources to self-host because you have to store the entire network (a very very high storage cost only businesses can afford)
There are also servers that provide moderation - something a client consults to go "should I consider this person banned?". These can be self-hosted, but in the default app it's hardcoded
If you use a non-default app, you can't see profiles that require logins (so any artist who wants to avoid AI scrapers)
DMs are entirely centralised
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@cwebber I just realised your question may be more sarcastic or humorous than my autistic ass read
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@cwebber I hear they have at least two different computers in their base of operations. That counts as decentralized, right?
@cwebber This blog is from someone who is intimately familiar with the technologies under Mastodon: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky
@cwebber from what I read it can be decentralised, in the sense that if you really try hard, you'd be able to host your own instance, but it will never be peer-to-peer, so the traffic will always go through the bluesky central hub.
I am not really a technical guy so I might misunderstood it, so I am looking forward to read the replies too.
@cwebber i found this diagram extremely intuitive, may be helpful to you as well!
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dark side of the moon album cover, representing a beam of light hitting a prism and splitting out into a rainbow. the beam is labeled "social media beam", the prism is labeled "center", the blue part of the rainbow is highlighted and labeled "blue", and the background is labeled "sky"...
@cwebber Did they buy a bunch of centralization offsets? Maybe there's a mesh network of raspberry pis planted in a rainforest somewhere?
@cwebber well it depends on what "decentralized" means, and it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is...
@cwebber You mean decent-ralized, like making them decent? I hear Bluesky is making use of AI moderation plus libertarian market incentives, so I'm sure they're much more decent than this place.
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Sam the Eagle saying FEDIVERSE WEIRDOS@cwebber OK, hear me out... maybe it's controlled by a single entity, but that entity could have some kind of "offering" to sell shares of the company to the "public". Like, anyone could buy one! Then, naturally, the VCs will celebrate by purchasing billions of slices of avocado toast and lattes, and that wealth will "trickle-down" to everyone else, who will then buy their own shares. I will take my nobel prize in economics now, thank you.
Bluesky is decentralized because it keeps all the data in de center.
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@cwebber Oooh good question! Uhhh so basically Fediverse is based on the concept of a federation, which is a form of hegemony and therefore not decentralised.
Whereas BlueSky runs in the cloud, which is a distributed computing system and thus decentralised.
Hope this helps! Feel free to ask me if you have any more questions.
@cwebber@social.coop I don't know if anyone's researched that question yet. You could be a pioneer if you investigate it!
it's pseudo decentralized
you can run your own data server which hosts your account and everything you post (including media) but the relay is pretty much centralized because it provides and coordinates the whole network (that's why search across the whole network works)
it's possible to also host your own relay but this comes at the cost of several TB of data
basically it's the same concept as blockchain without the chain
@cwebber
Can I jump on with a related question? Could someone explain to me how to make something like komoot decentralised? A platform to share and find GPS tracks, and planned routes, to mark and recommend locations, to comment on your friend's activity, etc. It's obviously integrated in a map, but it's also a social network. And komoot just got bought by an investor with a bad record...
@cwebber Not sure if this is one of those “humor” things humans sometimes do, but you don’t need blogposts to answer that question. The answer is a simple “no”.
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Thank you for being awesome!
(Meanwhile my joke mind is trying to think up the Star Trek joke equivalent of anti-decentralized and coming up with various Borg permutations and failing because that is already overloaded with Mark "Sucks they're Borg" FB/Meta/IG BS)
It's elliptical with one focus in the venture capital region and the other not physically meaningful. That should clear it up.
@cwebber currently the sky is both blue and decentralized but I am heading a project to resolve both issues by pumping the entire atmosphere into the earth's core.
@cwebber At least it's not centralized. I tested and I could open it in a browser window on the left half of the screen. But I could also open it in fullscreen. So... it's both not centralized and not decentralized?
But there's possible further research, I didn't test with multiple displays.
(Ok, I didn't actually test anything at all.)
this post may help:
How Does BlueSky Work?, by @steveklabnik.com
https://steveklabnik.com/writing/how-does-bluesky-work/
> One of the reasons I am enthusiastic about BlueSky is because of the way that it works. So in this post, I am going to lay out some of the design and the principles behind this design, as I understand them. I am not on the BlueSky team, so these are my takes only.
@cwebber not sure if you saw this - I quote you and Bryan. https://privacy.thenexus.today/decentralization-and-erasure-blacksky-bluesky-and-the-atmosphere-2/
@cwebber this recurring bit seems slightly mean
I mean,
audience := enum({
friends: "ha, funny one!",
socially_intelligent_folks: "I detect snark",
reply_guy_trolls: error.fallen_into_trap(),
neurodivergent_folks: // bug, treated like a reply guy troll, feels terrible/embarrassed once they realize
})
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@risottobias I do try to reply to the neurodivergent folks who are embarassed and tell them I appreciate them when I see it tho
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@cwebber you're a good egg.
I'm always confused with how esoteric and awesome your stuff is.
us mortals are unworthy.
@cwebber I don’t get how something with a single instance can be called decentralized. It’s supposed to be federated — but it’s not (yet).
Which means.. it’s not billionaire-proof :/
Either way, I’m not into it. Getting random OnlyFans bot follower notifications from Bridgy feels like Twitter all over again.
Hackers, educators, tinkerers:
The 2025 Hacker Initiative grant cycle is open. We're funding individuals and groups who are:
🔹 Advancing hacker culture
🔹 Promoting digital rights
🔹 Educating the public
If you're building tools, sharing knowledge, or shaking things up apply here 👉 https://hackerinitiative.org/apply-now/
Signal boost appreciated.
2025 was the year I learned contempt of court only applies to poor people.
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I seem to recall when under arrest on a contempt of court charge, I couldn't even find a bail bond place that would bail me out from the phone call I was able to make from a holding cell and my bail was set at something like $500. ;-/
I wouldn't know what it's like to be rich, let alone rich and dealing with court, but I imagine it's probably a lot different than what I have experienced.
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@teajaygrey which one?
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"languages" is how is reads now, phew!
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I must have missed the memo.
Here's a picture of a jazz band [from Carmel Middle School] I performed with circa 1990 at the Santa Cruz Jazz Festival:
A year or two earlier, I performed in the Monterey Jazz Festival with an ensemble as the same chair as fellow trumpet player: Tanya Darby (https://college.berklee.edu/people/tanya-darby). Later, Dizzy Gillespie played the same stage after we had been openers! As I "joke" (but kind of srs) my music "career" has been all downhill since then.
I came to post-industrial music (at least as far as deejayin), later.
Meanwhile, Trent Reznor of NIN notoriety, seems to have kind of operated in a different "evolution"? His album, Pretty Hate Machine was released in 1989, but he didn't help with the score to Pixar's jazz themed film Soul until 2020. I never got the impression he feared jazz either, maybe he just wasn't clued into it earlier?
Some say music is cyclical; but when someone tunes into a particular genre or performer is anyone's guess.
Honestly, I find jazz to have pretty strictly adhered to boundaries by many performers. Blues scales are reductionist, simplified. That's not a bad thing per se. Punk's "three chords" tropes for example are even more reduced.
Thankfully there are vast swaths of music outside of such genres entirely, completely different scales, notations, instrumentations. I'm not sure if it's limitless, but there's a lot more out there than most ever take time to explore.
Earlier today I was driving in a rental car and listening to commercial radio, and what they play is so awful. Popular, I'm sure, but repetitive and laden with ads. The same songs over and over again. The same ads over and over. Such a waste of the airwaves.
The new PEEVE standard to replace CVE¹
As we are facing the demise of CVE it is time for Switzerland to stand up to the challenge by introducing the PEEVE standard: Paradoxical Extended Emmenthaler Vulnerability Enumeration.
The concept is very simple: all software (and hardware!) starts with a PEEVE value of 1, with each vulnerability discovered the PEEVE value increases. You can therefore trivially know your patch level by looking at the current PEEVE number and the installed PEEVE number.
The PEEVE number is subject to multipliers to better reflect the true underlying vulnerability number, a partial list is given below:
* multiply by the number of users
* passes testing: x 10 because it is a lie
* tested in production: x 1.2 for honesty
* coded in C: x 10
* coded in C++: x 100
* coded in Rust: x 10 because they use C bindings
* runs on Unix: x 100
* runs on Windows: x 1000
* runs on seL4: x 0.1
* counter code implemented by ESA: x 100
* unit conversion by NASA: x 1000
* "it is airgapped": x 1000 because it is a lie
* written in formally verified ADA, runs on rad-hard processor: x 1
* IoT: x 1x10^4
* has a parser: x 1000
* uses ASN.1: x 1x10^6
* uses encryption keys from examples in NIST standards: x 1x10^5
* release notes contains "funny" puns: x 100 because they should have used the time to test instead of writing puns
Examples:
* Ivanti: 6.3466 x 10^5
* Fortinet: 7.2847 x 10^6
etc.
Note that we use scientific notation so that we can stress-test the parsers of vulnerability management software when they read in the PEEVE CSV file.
The ISO committee is welcome to contact me to formalise this.
__
¹ posted to LinkedIn because I love thinking about all the stuck-up sekurity eggsperts thinking how this is inappropriate, etc., etc.
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@cynicalsecurity Then you get PEEVEdB (or more accurately dBPEEVE) and we get to ague if PEEVE is power or root power.
Long post [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
@cynicalsecurity gruyere de Jura please, no more Emmentaler I can't take it.
Dear 2028 Hopefuls,
Remember how we used to say, "Just run on legalizing pot and you'll win by 20 points"?
In 2028 only two planks:
1. Nuremberg trials
2. Rehire enough IRS agents to assign 30-50 to every billionaire, and jail any who aren't in compliance within a year. Same for every Fortune 100 company with jail guaranteed for at least two c-suite employees for non-compliance
That's it. Justice and money. We can debate what to do with the $150b in (currently) uncollected taxes later
Sometimes I wonder how things would look like today if „the web“ hadn't been pushed in a certain direction with html blink tag, ton's of "dynamic content“ and javascript so early on.
Thinking of a web with perfect typography that rivals \LaTeX. A web with great layout and navigation instead of all the attention seeking stuff, advertising and tracking which are so ubiquitous today.
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These days, look into upTEX and UpLaTeX and upLATEX 2ε because, Unicode and also, vertically aligned languages.
The web at least handles UTF-8 encoding OK now but it took a really long time to get there, and as far as vertically aligned languages? I think Chromium devs maybe fixed a bug I filed years ago, within the last 6 months? WebKit/Safari never exhibited that bug. But suffice to say, a lot of the web is still very Anglo/English centric.
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@teajaygrey I'm aware of both TeX and LaTeX. Been using it >30y now. Well, a whole lot less the past 5-10 yrs.
Picked LaTeX over TeX in my post for the same reason I think people should use semantic HTML (but aren't, which is part of the problem IMHO).
About the pains of UTF-8 support: Seems to be a never ending battle. I've been around when people "discussed" MIME on and for Usenet. Had „fun“ with SW and people struggling handling even simple stuff like ISO-8859-*.
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I am sure over 30 years ago, maybe you used MS-DOS too, hopefully you aren't still using MS-DOS?
To paraphrase a fellow CS undergrad in the early 1990s, "so HTTP and HTML are like the bastard step children of FTP and TeX and worse than both."
Or, to quote Alan Kay:
"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."
Doubtlessly, the web derived inspiration from prior art, such as TeX; but it is, as Alan Kay would describe similar things an example of: "reinventing the flat tire".
Yet, because of some of the similarities, your sentiments aren't unique.
Also see: https://www.cynicusrex.com/file/web4.html
Which inspired me to write this rebuttal: https://reviktra.neocities.org/writeabook/notlatexplease.html
(which I haven't re-read in a while, I do not know how well it has held up, the author to whom I was writing that, basically replied with something to the effect of "I wrote the whole web4 thing as a joke" yet failed to ever announce that it was intended to be written as humor, or sarcasm and subsequently, I, and doubtlessly other readers, having not paid admission to a stand up night, assumed it was written in good faith.)
UTF-8 is over 30 years old now and significantly more widely adopted than it was previously. It's also much more widely in use than EUC, (Shift)JIS and other more bespoke and regional encodings for non-ASCII orthographic systems as might have been encountered in Japanese micro-computing systems in the 1980s for example.
Yet, the aforementioned WebKit/Safari, for reasons that escape all rationale, still defaults to "Western (ISO Latin1)" even on systems which ship from Apple with Japanese keyboards.
Sometimes, technologies are overtly ignorant of the world at large, because of regional bullshit of where such technologies are "designed" regardless of where they are manufactured.
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@teajaygrey No, 30yrs ago I was using FreeBSD. Had been using SunOS, ISC and SCO remotely before that.
I'm afraid I remember how old Unicode and UTF-* are. What I managed to mostly forget are the "heated" discussions in various groups about encodings, MIME etc.
Heard about JIS and others, but being in Europe I've never dealt with those.
Should the US prioritize settling Mars?
Should we all just read A City on Mars and call the whole thing off?
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/should-the-us-prioritize-settling-mars/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
Stanley Lieber - Friendly Computer 2
https://massivefictions.com/friendly_computer/
A new issue of the #zine.
#stanleylieber #zine #friendlycomputer
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A stack of Friendly Computer 2 zines...
I attempted to purchase issue 1 and issue 2.
The browser, seems to think I didn't, but PayPal's emails make me think maybe they did figure it out?
¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
Alt...
screenshot of a PayPal error message which reads: "Things don't appear to be working at the moment."...
@teajaygrey I got the same too! I thought it was just me. The money went out, so I guess it's fine.
I think the error is related to the "redirect back to the merchant" action.
boring life BS, cars [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
Today was exhausting.Checked out of hotel.
Rented car.
Bought some groceries.
Went to library, printed out e-file authorization form, signed it, emailed it to my CPA, thankfully that was sufficient, they don't need me to mail them a physical copy. Maybe the first time taxes have been filed "on time" in I don't even know how long (the CPA automatically files extensions if I am "late" but sometimes I provide all the required documentation in advance, and they still lollygag and file extensions anyway? whatever).
Went to a used car lot. Test drove three cars: a 2013 Porsche Cayenne (diesel), a 2015 Audi Q5 quattro TDI (diesel) and a 2017 Land Rover Discovery HSE Td6 (diesel). All of these have more than 100,000 miles on their odometers and asking prices under $20,000 USD.
Had some lunch (phew!)
Went to a Honda dealership, test drove a 2025 CR-V Hybrid "Sport" (FWD, leather). Window sticker price was $41k "out the door" price over $43k!
Collected mail from my mailbox.
Dropped some things off at my storage unit.
Went to a different Honda dealership, test drove a different 2025 Honda CRV hybrid "sport" (AWD, no leather, yay!), with their "car doc" maintenance/warranty plan, asking price was over $50k! Though the guy was willing to "make me a deal" out the door price for $45k that night. z0mg. Those "car doc" "deals" too? I swear the dealership where the last car I was driving was purchased, claimed to have something similar (like oil changes for the life of the car, the "car doc" plan was oil changes for the first 100,000 miles and tire rotations, etc. other low material cost, low labor time things) and guess what? The dealership disappeared! Well, not entirely. They changed names. The same staff worked at both, but the old owners declared bankruptcy or something and OFC the "new" dealership, with a slightly different name, despite having the same staff at the same location? Did not honor any of the "lifetime" oil change service for the car that was purchased there.
Eventually stopped and got some dinner, 10 minutes before that place was closing.
Checked into a hotel (the same hotel, different room, free "upgrade" to a King bed, but it's missing chairs and is on the whole, not as nice as the room I was in, but the rate per night is also slightly lower so I dunno).
Need to get up early tomorrow to return the rental car.
Also, for some reason for much of the day I was thinking it was Wednesday instead of Tuesday? So I guess my plans for tomorrow don't involve going to work after I drop the rental car off but I should probably try to test drive some other vehicles.
Pretty sure I drove over 200 miles today (and the rental place charges $.30 a mile for every mile over 150 miles), just in the rental car, and presumably at least another 2-5 miles each in all the other cars I drove?
The April 15th, 2025 Jail/Zones Production User Call is up:
We #FreeBSD 15.0 goals, jail escape mitigations (please review!), attracting Kubernetes users, configuration file delimiters, an update on Kleene.dev, Jail names vs. IDs, and more!
"Don't forget to slam those Like and Subscribe buttons."
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@dexter If any #FreeBSD folks are looking for a jails-related project, the one I’d really like someone to do is UID mapping:
For each jail, record the UID of the creator in the jail structure (we should reserve space for this in 15).
For filesystem access, do two checks, one of the creator UID against the file, the other of the jailed user UID against a field in extended attributes. If that field does not exist, do the check against the real rights for the file.
When file permissions or ownership are changed, record that change in xattrs, not in the file’s permissions.
Do not allow modification of these xattrs by jailed users.
This is most of what is required to permit jails to be created by non-root users. A jailed user’s rights are never more than those of the user, but may be less.
"zpool export" and "zpool import" are a bit magical… the way you just export your pool, take the disks out, put them in another box and import them is just…
That it works between machines with different endianness is just incredible.
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@cynicalsecurity@bsd.network the fact that the pool settings are stored on the pool itself and that you don't have to actually do a zpool export most of the time 👌
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@puppygirlhornypost2 yes, you are sort-of recommended a zpool export, I confess to having done it without the export which, in theory, is the bit which puts the EFI headers for endianness on it.
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@cynicalsecurity @puppygirlhornypost2 A common way to mess this up is (on ZoL) not having the right /etc/hostid in your initramfs. If it doesn't match after an unclean reboot (so no export), zfs will refuse to import without -f, so it won't boot.
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@cynicalsecurity
Makes a lot of sense for clustered file servers using shared storage to keep it so simple.
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@abortretryfail ZFS is good, very good, pity that Larry-the-unmentionable took Solaris closed-source again and OpenZFS diverged plus took time to include features which were being developed within ex-Sun.
The equivalent of a whole filesystem, copied transparently while the machine was still running, over SSH. It felt too easy yet it worked.
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@nihl yes, zfs send and zfs receive are similarly magical and, for even more magic, doing remote backups with znapzend is beautiful.
Not to mention that the latest versions of vm-bhyve offer the brilliant "vm migrate" which uses zfs send/receive to move VMs :)
All FOSS Backstage 2025 sessions are now available on YouTube!
If you missed them live or want to re-watch your favorite session, all the recordings are on our YouTube channel.
Don’t forget to share your favorite sessions with the community!
Watch now: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLq-odUc2x7i-vFcBUZoDxTz9Vyu0Joq0X&si=VmZiR7ByfpYRMvje
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Ana Jimenez Santamaria presenting on stage at FOSS Backstage 2025uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
Trump openly calling for deporting US citizens to gulags https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/trump-wants-deport-some-us-citizens-el-salvador-2025-04-14/
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Older...
uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
@cwebber Glad you posted this. I’m still not “seeing” a majority of Americans who are paying attention yet. Nor am I seeing that a majority of Americans are believing fascism is a problem and is taking over every part of the USA.
How utterly horrifying there’s no majority opposing all this 👋
uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
@cwebber Gulags are way too much socialism for him. He maybe prefers the other kind of such camps.
uspol, so beyond constitutional crisis it's fucked [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
Trump, White House, and El Salvador president say they aren't going to return man white house lawyers admitted was deported in error, despite the Supreme Court saying they had to https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/trump-bukele-el-salvador-prison-return-men-kilmar-abrego-garcia-meeting-cecot/
As we're about to lose peertube.nz, what other peertube instances are you folks using? (Not US based please)
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@runoutgroover stink, what happened to peertube.nz?
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@jonathanharker Too few users combined with hosting cocts apparently.
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🇳🇿@runoutgroover @jonathanharker I'm considering setting up a new instance, hosted onshore in Aotearoa (sponsored hosting provided by https://CatalystCloud.nz)... I've already got a proven configuration, so should be able to do it fairly quickly... but it needs good folks to use it (and moderate its content)... Not sure I want to do all that solo (I already do it for a bunch of stuff - https://webservices.magnificent.nz)